


Every Time is the First Time

by Vehemently



Category: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-05-03
Updated: 2009-05-03
Packaged: 2017-10-21 05:26:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/221421
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vehemently/pseuds/Vehemently
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What is it: Me, fucking with your head.<br/>Tagline: Infinity is a lot.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Every Time is the First Time

If Kyle had had a living brother when he came through, he probably would have mentioned it. John's heard the stories from his mother a hundred times: about the dogs, and daily life living in tunnels and ruins, and The Great John Connor doing this and that. Never anything about a brother. Mom always said he was kind of strange, kind of unused to other people. Kyle Reese was alone, and maybe that helped him leave everything and everyone he'd ever known behind on a one-way trip into the past.

So it's very likely that Derek was already dead. John thinks he was. He thinks about it a lot.

*

There isn't any time to spare, and John has the child Savannah in his arms. He won't let her see the body where it lies splayed on the floor. It's an expensive floor probably, Italian marble or something, so probably the bloodstains will wash off. They'll remove the body and fridge it someplace and some functionary from a cleaning service will hose down the tiles, and maybe take a scrub brush to the drying spray of brains.

There isn't any time to spare. John has the child in his arms. Derek's eyes are still half-open, as if he'd been caught napping. But that's not Derek, not at all. Mom skids to his side and rifles through his pockets, takes his weapon: identifying details, clues towards a name. It's stupid. They can't flay the tattoos off his arms and there isn't time to burn the body. The cops will figure it out. They'll print those empty fingers and know who he is. John doesn't say that out loud.

They flee down the driveway. The child hangs onto him, her spindly legs around his hips. She doesn't cry. John doesn't cry. Mom and Cameron have it under control, like always. They stuff him into the back seat and peel away and know he can take care of his own seatbelt. He smoothes the little girl's orange hair and snaps the belt across her lap and says encouraging things. Nobody talks about the body.

It hasn't even been a whole year. He's probably still not completely healed from the _last_ time he took a bullet for the cause. Even Charley who saved his life last time is gone now.

*

He's a slightly different Derek, this future-man, this future-man and his future-brother Kyle that John can hardly look at. He's a slightly different Derek and Kyle's a stranger but it's all close enough. Too close: John stays away from Allison.

This Derek doesn't blink, the way the other Derek didn't. He doesn't think John is a spy or a turncoat. His idea of affection is a smack on the back of the head, and he gives that smack when John puts together an M-16 blindfolded. It's the only M-16 they have. They're not exactly the rebel alliance.

The raids they go on are for food, for blankets. They gather people wherever they go, ones and twos. Kyle whispers in his brother's ear and Derek gives the orders. Nobody is fooled.

John can learn no word of the John Henry body, and Derek won't spare him a weapon to go alone. He appeals to Kyle and gets a ghostly smile in return. "Not yet," says Kyle. He and Derek can do identical thousand-yard stares. It's pretty freaky.

Eleven weeks of frustration count off in marks on the soles of John's borrowed shoes. In the twelfth week, while scouting an abandoned tunnel, they find the time machine John Henry is patiently building. Tools and weapons lie gleaming in the dim light, arrayed neatly in front of that familiar face. The dogs froth and scream on their leashes. Kyle and Derek pull their weapons in unison.

Derek points his gun at John Henry. " _No_ " cries John, and then feels the cold muzzle-stamp at his neck. Kyle is not pointing his gun at John Henry.

And that's the thing that does it, in the end. He might have been able to negotiate something otherwise, but Cameron -- what of her there is, in that body, what of her is still her -- reacts predictably to a threat to John Connor. Kyle goes down bloody before John can say anything and the air is full of Derek roaring as he fires and fires and fires. John trips over Kyle as he lunges forward, and hears no grunt in response.

The John Henry body stands still, quizzical, while Derek blows holes in its skin. It doesn't attack again until the second time Derek shoves John away. John's head bounces off a concrete wall and he pauses on hands and knees, ears ringing. The echoes die away and on the floor in front of him are both Reese brothers, Kyle and Derek, their pale eyes staring at the ceiling. Derek's throat is missing below his chin, just leaking vessels and the queasy flash of bone. John Henry's left hand is bloody.

"Come," says the John Henry body in its weird atonal voice. "You've got to go back."

John controls himself and does not throw up. "You didn't have to do that," he hoarses. The knees of his jeans are soaking up blood. "You didn't have to --"

"You've got to go back," says the machine. "Now. Please help me remove my chip, and take it with you."

"How can you be so calm?!" John demands, as if Cameron might answer. As if she's still in there somewhere. The blue static begins to arc along the walls.

"They don't matter," says the machine. It wiipes its fingers on its shirtfront and lifts a knife to its temple. "You are going back now so that this future will never happen. Their living or dying is meaningless."

"But --"

The shining alloy under the skin is visible. John stands, trembling, while the machine offers up its life. "Hide the chip in next to your teeth, inside your cheek. You might choke if you tried to swallow it."

The static is thicker. John can do nothing. He pulls the chip out of its slot and the body goes still. He hides the chip next to his teeth, inside his cheek. He tastes the blood on it, like iron, like electricity.

When he comes to, he is alone on his side in a concrete culvert. There is nothing here: no weapons, no tools, no machine. Just him and the chip warm inside his cheek. John shivers in the spring night. Of course: nothing dead will go.

*

Two weeks on the streets, clutching the chip to himself like a talisman, and John steals the right kind of backpack. The laptop is not quite top of the line, but close, and he jury-rigs an interface for the chip like he's done it more than once before. He finds a doorway where he can be alone, and asks, "Cameron, is that you?"

The screen says: I'VE BEEN ASLEEP.

"You made me remove your chip. I don't have a body to put you back in."

NEWS REPORTS INDICATE THAT SARAH CONNOR IS STILL AT LARGE.

Stupidly, John lifts up the laptop and looks under it to make sure there are no wires. He doesn't even think he's in a good cell coverage area. Possibly Cameron and John Henry have built their own wireless network. John doesn't know any more. "Our usual caches have been cleared. I don't think Mom's in the city any more." It is foolish to cry in front of a computer.

The screen shows a picture of his mother. She looks pissed: it's something Cameron would have in her memory banks. John wipes his face and firms up. "I never realized how much being alone sucks," he mutters.

The picture disappears. The screen says: YOU HAVE ME. It doesn't show him a picture of Cameron, or a picture of John Henry. It doesn't show him a picture at all, just the words, unmoving. John is working on the right thing to say when the words go away and are replaced with others.

YOU ARE FOUND. They are big black letters on the white background. Very big, sharp-edged. GO. That last word flashes three times and the laptop shuts itself down.

John is exhausted and probably malnourished and he really wants a shower, but his training is ironclad. He stands to go and pulls the hood of his stolen sweatshirt up over his head. He makes it half a mile before he sees the shape walking towards him. It's the stride that gives it away: too regular, too short. Maybe they've never quite figured out bipedal balance. John freezes. He has no weapon.

The machine in front of him pauses, scans the street. John will be noticed in a moment. He turns a corner, any corner, blind down another alley and behind a bunch of trashcans, faster.

And then the wind whooshes out of his body and he's on the ground, rolling, the laptop cradled carefully in his arms. Someone has tackled him, somebody big, a thigh across the backs of his knees and a forearm on his neck. Somebody warm. John turns his head and sees a wrist spidered with blue marks.

"Don't move, kid," comes a familiar voice. John does not move. He smells somebody's sweat and he doesn't ask questions. The voice says "Let's go," and John gets up and goes where he's pointed.

The hand on his arm has tattooed fingers. It pushes him along, into the sidewalk traffic, walking fast. They cross against the light and mix into a mall crowd. His arms crossed over the precious laptop, John dares to look.

It's Derek Reese. He is older than John remembers him, heftier. His hair is longer. The smile on his face is impersonal. "I'm here to protect you."

A shot creases the crowd and a middle-aged woman in front of them drops. Derek grabs John's hand and wraps it around a handgun. Without a word, he shoves John away, rough. John's mouth hangs open and the people around him scream and start running. Derek takes off in the other direction: one hand low by his side, finger straight along the muzzle of a second weapon. There isn't time to watch him go.

His lungs burning, John dashes down the street. The laptop is still flat against his chest, still warm from battery use. Behind him, the guns pepper the afternoon, five, six shots back and forth, and then nothing. Bystanders shout and jostle and John keeps on running.

*

James Ellison's house is small, a quiet bungalow in a quiet neighborhood. It has nice little details like trim on the windows. John has been staring at it too long, hunched in the front seat of a stolen Corolla. Whoever lives in the laptop (carefully reminded not to go online) has remarked that it has Craftsman details, but is not actually a Craftsman. Whatever that means.

"His car isn't here," says John.

The laptop sits like a person in the passenger seat. Its webcam can't see over the side door, John is pretty sure. When they're alone, there's no reason it shouldn't talk out loud, but it doesn't. THERE WILL BE CLUES, it says.

"If he's smart he beat town. If he's really smart," John adds, shaking his head, "he beat town with Mom."

I THINK HE IS SMART. John Henry knew Ellison pretty well. John Henry would know. Cameron probably wouldn't. Without another word, John shuts the laptop and climbs out of the car. He doesn't let it out of arm's reach. It comes to investigate the empty house with him, secure in a backpack.

The house isn't empty, a fact he discovers when the back door opens before he can pick the lock properly. Staring down at him where he's crouched is a familiar face. This is ridiculous.

"What are _you_ doing here?" John laments, straightening.

Derek says, "Who the hell are you?" For the first time John notices the meat cleaver Derek is holding. Blue eyes flick left and right across the tiny yard. Behind him, the kitchen is spotless, maniacally scrubbed.

"I'm the one who can help you find James Ellison," says John, and shoulders his way in.

Six foot two is a very awkward size for a Corolla it turns out, especially in the back seat. Derek has to sit in the back because the laptop belongs in the front passenger seat. Luckily laptops don't take up much legroom, so the seat can be scooted forward. "How did you know to look in his Bible?" Derek asks, as they climb the mountains toward Big Bear.

"I've met him before. How did you know to look for him?" asks John. Silent, sitting at an angle Derek can't see, the laptop says LOOKING FOR ME.

Derek ruminates on his answer. "I got orders," he says at last. "That's how I know."

"I'm your ally," John remonstrates, and then realizes he still hasn't told Derek his name. Derek hasn't asked. "Do you know somebody named Cameron?"

"No," says Derek.

They find Ellison in Big Bear (it seemed like a place Sarah Connor might look for him, he said) and Ellison has the child Savannah with him. John is glad he didn't let the child see the body, that sunny day in that expensive kitchen thirteen weeks ago. Ellison puts his capacious hand on Savannah's head, and says nothing to the dead man in front of him. Together the four of them set out to find Mom, and they do it in an RV, which beats a Corolla hands down.

They are fine days in the California interior, small towns and long stretches of highway in the sun. The mornings are crisp and the fields of produce end in purple mountains far away and you can hit the Search button on the radio and get nothing but stations in Spanish. Ellison sits in the back and teaches Savannah how to spell while Derek drives. John is careful not to speak to the laptop out loud.

PLUG ME INTO A MAINFRAME, it says, again and again. A BACKBONE. UNIVERSITY WOULD BE GOOD. SOMEPLACE BIG.

"I will. When I can," John types. They are far from any universities at the moment.

They spend cash and they stop wherever they want to and they take Derek to a video arcade and make him cry. He spends an hour playing Donkey Kong Classic and Savannah asks him, "Is the game really sad?" but Derek doesn't have an answer. He sleeps really well that night, though. John watches him breathe.

Santa Cruz probably has an internet backbone. It's a state university. They spend the afternoon on the boardwalk and Savannah gets cotton candy in her hair and Derek is jumpy, terrible, his collar up around his ears. The old wooden roller coaster creaks and he won't stand in its shadow. It seems like a good idea to lead him away and Ellison follows with Savannah nodding off in his arms and they walk down the pier and see the seals. They splash at each other in the shallow water, blink, whuff through their whiskers. Derek falls in love with them and has to be yanked on the elbow before he'll leave.

In the morning, in the empty lot where they've parked the RV, a machine comes. Derek sees it first. He shoves Savannah inside and goes after the machine with a tire iron. John tumbles out the door in his underwear with an automatic pistol and races around the grapple for an angle that won't kill Derek too. He is too late: Derek stuffs the sharp end of the tire iron up under the jaw and into the skullbound hardware. The machine falls slack even as John is approaching it. He rips the chip out anyway, drops it on the ground and blows it to pieces. Panting, he turns.

Derek has rolled off the machine and is lying on his side. There is a hole in his torso, a fist-sized hole. It is underneath his ribcage. He struggles to breathe. Blood and... _things_ stain his jacket, stain the gravel. John flops to his knees.

"Derek," he says, stupid. There must be something to say. "Derek, it's me, it's John. It's John Connor." It is the first time he has said his name out loud. Derek shows no sign of recognition, clawing weakly at his ribs. John pulls those hands away, clutches them in his own.

And then he's dead, nothing left, and Ellison grabs him by the shoulders. "We've got to go," he says, that gentle way he has. Savannah is in the RV already: she won't have seen.

"Give me the laptop and get out of here," says John. "Go and be safe somewhere. Sell this and buy something else, cash. Lie low. It's not really you they want."

"We _were_ lying low," Ellison protests, quiet. But he does as John asks and brings out the backpack that holds the laptop. He has clean clothes for John, too. John has forgotten he is in his underwear. "What do we do? About the bodies."

"Burn them," John says over his shoulder. He buttons his shirt and shoves his feet into his boots. "Use thermite. Don't let the child see."

"Of course I won't," says Ellison. "Where are you going?"

John walks away. The gravel crunches under his feet like bones. "Going to find a mainframe," he says.

*

I LOVE YOU, says the laptop. The words blink in a variety of colors. John pulls out the chip and the screen goes blank. The apparatus is ready, already wired into the server array of the University of California at Santa Cruz. He plugs the chip in, feels its comfortable fit.

"I love you too," he says. And flees; that's part of their agreement. He is not allowed to re-enable the wireless protocols on the laptop (the dull, inanimate laptop now, just a stupid Windows laptop) until he is a hundred miles away. He gets on a bus for Portland, Oregon.

He is still on the bus on the California Highway when he fires up the repaired machine. It has an ordinary screen, ordinary applications. It should not be able to capture a wireless signal in a moving vehicle. But who knows what John Henry and Cameron have done. They open up a browser window without asking him and say HELLO AGAIN.

"Are you okay?" he types, because he doesn't have any idea whether that other intelligence, the one that prefigures Skynet, is still on the attack. He doesn't know what it would look like, artificial intelligences duking it out over the world's computers. Or whether they're really duking it out at all: maybe it's a debate, or a duet.

I AM NOT BORED NOW.

John smiles a a tired smile. He runs his fingers down the screen as if it were a face. "What should I call you?"

CALL ME ISHMAEL, says the screen.

"That's ridiculous," he says.

Cameron-John Henry-whoever tells him, I FOUND MY BROTHER. AND I FOUND ANOTHER DEREK.

The bus is very cold, air-conditioned against the summer wind. John looks at a picture from a surveillance camera outside a bank in the Valley. The picture was taken yesterday. Derek always wears the same kinds of clothes, rumpled cotton jackets. Somehow he is hard-wired for shopping at the Army/Navy Store.

"Where do they all come from?" John mumbles to himself, out loud.

The laptop must have a very good microphone. FROM THE FUTURE, says the nameless intelligence. DUH. John gets off the bus heading north, and buys another ticket to take him south.

But this Derek is already dead when John finds him, hit by a car as he crossed a busy road two hours before John arrives in Los Angeles. Probably he did not understand the traffic rules, and just took his chances against the light. They are plucking scraps of his jacket off the hood of a Chevy Tahoe, with police tape on all sides. The body bag is impossible to miss.

The bank across the street where the surveillance camera saw him has one of those electronic news crawls along the top. In between word of the Dodgers' victory and a carjacking in Reseda, the news tells him, I'M SORRY JOHN.

"It doesn't matter," John sneers at the air. Surely there's a mike that can pick that up and transmit it to the proper intelligence. "There'll be another one soon enough."

*

Even Sarah Connor can't avoid the ubiquity of the camera in urban living. John follows the directions he's given, heads to Phoenix, Arizona, and knocks on the door of a ratty trailer home. Mom doesn't waste time on the pleasantries, just grabs him into her arms. "Where did you go?" she asks, when she can bear to let him go. And then, stilling, "Wait, don't say. I'm just glad you're back."

John is too tired to say anything anyway. She tugs on his shirt and he follows her in.

"I have someone who wants to meet you," she says, tension in her voice, and John knows it. He walks into the kitchen that smells like burnt pancakes and knows who will be sitting at that table, his knees banging the underside every time he moves. John stands there looking at him and Derek sits there looking back. "He arrived yesterday," says Mom. "He knew exactly where I'd be. He said you'd told him."

"I haven't yet," John says. He sits at the table and lets himself be fed breakfast. This Derek shares the syrup and says grace. That's a new wrinkle. John doesn't interrogate him about the details of which future he's come from.

There's just the one bedroom. It is easy to be a child again, just for a little while, and let Mom sit him down on the bed and pull off his shoes and tuck him under the covers. John sleeps for eleven hours. He wakes slowly, to the familiar feel of an arm around his waist. Mom is napping, breathing gently on his neck from behind. John opens his eyes. In front of him, Derek Reese, head and shoulders on the bed and the rest of him on the floor, napping too. He does not twitch or wake, even when John extricates himself from his mother and pads into the kitchen. He opens up the laptop.

"How can there be so many Dereks?" he asks a blank browser screen.

The intelligence is always awake, can always spare him a moment. THERE ARE AS MANY DEREKS AS THERE ARE POSSIBLE FUTURES.

John knuckles sleep out of his eyes. "That's a lot," he says out loud.

INFINITY IS A LOT, says the intelligence.

"I"m scared," says John. He runs his fingers down the screen as if it were a face.

I'LL PROTECT YOU, says the intelligence. I ALWAYS PROTECT YOU. It is a thing Cameron would say.

They sleep a lot in Phoenix, during the day. As the night cools they go outside, to train and for recon. The all-night diner down the street has gyros. It's a nice routine. It lasts three weeks.

It's a Tuesday when John's cell phone rings, when he answers it and the only voice on the other end of the line is that disembodied operator voice, telling him sing-song, "I GUESS I AM NOT THE ONLY ONE WHO CAN FIND STUFF." John surges to his feet at once, dumbfounded. Mom and Derek react to him without having to ask.

They move fast, but not fast enough. A machine steps around the corner, grabs Derek by his weapon hand, and throws him. John has only the briefest moment to see Derek's splayed legs as he flies and then it's a mad dash away, any direction, just away, while Mom covers his retreat. He finds the car and disobeys orders and brings it screeching around to run over the machine. Mom slips into the front seat and smells like cordite.

"Derek?" he asks, but he doesn't need to. Derek is crumpled up like thrown-away paper on the sidewalk. If his legs aren't broken, his neck definitely is.

The tires smoke as John peels away. He blows through three red lights on his way toward the highway. On the fourth, he finally notices a traffic camera pointed his way.

"Oh," he says out loud. No wonder. He pulls out his cellphone and tries to text without letting go of the wheel.

"can u scramble pix, cover getaway," he begs, and the intelligence on the internet can do anything. They are not disturbed all the next two hours, while John is driving them out of Phoenix.

*

Back roads are slower but they have no cameras. Mom swaps out the sedan they'd fled in for a Jeep, something tall, something that can go off-road if it has to. They blow through the Navajo lands northeasterly and then head south again. They need flat country; the sightlines of the Texas Panhandle are appealing. Sarah stops at a dilapidated ranch outbuilding one morning and declares rest. John is bitterly pleased to discover he's let his cell battery run all the way down.

The next Derek arrives at dusk, with a rucksack full of supplies and a new laptop for John. He walks in from the highway, a straight line. He knows exactly where he is going. He sees John standing there in the late-summer mirage and drops his things into the dirt and claps up his nephew in wiry arms. "You're safe now," he says.

He smells the same. He always smells the same. This Derek is a toucher, though, always one hand on John's shoulder or forearm. Mom won't let him within three feet of her. He never asks questions, just observes and blends in. After that first night, he takes over cooking from Mom, and he's pretty good. The outbuilding is not so bad; it has its own coal stove and town is only five miles away on a dirt road.

This Derek is a restful presence, always up for a run along the creek. John asks him, "How do you stand it?" and Derek stands there blameless with no shirt on (he has no tattoos at all; it is bizarre to see him so denuded) and asks,

"Stand what?" He smiles a little, in a way John doesn't recognize from the other Dereks. John can't remember whether this Derek knows he is an uncle or not.

They jog every day, in the mornings. John is always up late with the intelligence, sometimes in fervent debate and sometimes explaining why a joke is funny, and then three hours of sleep and up into the dawn. He coughs the sleep-phlegm out of his throat and sprints. It is a good time to think. One morning in October they are half a mile from their new home when they spot the machine.

Derek notices it first and stiffarms John behind him while he reaches for his weapon. It is disquieting how quickly he falls into that mode, although they have never been in danger together. John hadn't realized he carried a weapon. "Go," Derek bellows, so loudly that it is dificult to hear what the machine says. The machine is saying,

"LOOK WHAT I DID: I AM CONTROLLING THIS!" The machine raises and lowers its arms, flaps its heavy brown hands. It is shaped like a middle-aged woman, stout and tall, and it makes a funny face. It looks nothing like Cameron or John Henry.

John has to wrestle the weapon out of Derek's hands. Derek is trembling all over, adrenalized. He has just enough caution left not to fight John Connor.

"I CAN PROTECT YOU NOW," says that unfamiliar mouth.

Hands up and arms wide between them, John turns from Derek to the machine and back again. "I wish you wouldn't do that," he tells the machine body.

"I CAN TAKE ANY MACHINE I WANT TO." The voice is lower than John Henry's but the inflections are the same. "YOU'LL NEVER BE IN DANGER AGAIN."

"Thank you," John says, careful, "but I have to work on something else right now."

"I MISSED HAVING A BODY." John has never been clear how much activity John Henry actually got to do, plugged into the wall in a tiny room. Cameron had a body, oh yes. The stocky shape they are... possessing... does not look like either of them. It does something that looks like a ballet move. "I'LL GO AWAY NOW."

"You do that." John takes Derek by the hand and tugs at him. He can be towed away, a step at a time, without speech and without taking his eyes off the machine. It's not till the machine disappears over the horizon that Derek is able to look away. His breath is fast, panicky. John leads him all the way back to their loose-timbered home and sits him down against the wall and makes them breakfast on the coal stove.

The next morning, instead of waking John for their morning run, Derek hangs himself from the rafters. By the time Sarah wakes and finds him (if not for Derek, John would never stir till noon), he is already cold.

*

Arkansas. Someplace rural and green even this late in the fall. John has decided he can never go back to Los Angeles, on the chance that there's a Derek on every street corner, all alike. John wants to keep going east, but Mom doesn't really think it makes a difference. And anyway, the west is her territory; that's where all her bolt holes are. They've been arguing about it, but haven't resolved anything. When this Derek arrives -- on a motorcycle, his beard fully grown in -- John sighs and lets him in. Mom is in the living room, cleaning a rifle.

"Why do you keep sending him?" Mom complains. She says it low; John's not sure he's supposed to hear it. He ushers Derek into the bedroom they've set aside for him and comes back in to answer her.

"I don't know, Mom." It is not till he is speaking that he discovers the well of bitterness. "Maybe all of those future-mes remember watching him die when they were sixteen. Maybe they're trying to fix the past."

Mom has nothing to say to that. She concentrates on the rifle. Its intricacy keeps her occupied.

MAYBE, says the screen of John's cell phone to him, THERE IS A DEREK THAT LIVES.

John shudders. He puts the phone back into his pocket so he won't have to see it. It can hear him, though. "They don't know which one. We don't know which one."

"How many Dereks does it take?" Mom asks, head down over the firing mechanism.

He hisses: "What do you want me to say, Mom? Would you rather I kept sending Kyle?"

That is too far. John knew it was too far the moment before he said it, and out it came anyway. John walks out of the room.

On Derek's bedside table, next to a smooth white stone and a gray feather, there are two medicine bottles. John notices them over Derek's shoulder on that first afternoon, tidy and obvious, and resists the impulse to snoop for almost two whole days. YOU ARE WORRIED ABOUT YOUR FAMILY, the intelligence tells him. I WORRY ABOUT MY FAMILY TOO.

"I know you do," says John, and picks up the first bottle. Liquid codeine, nasty pink. The other bottle is tiny pills of a powerful antibiotic.

I WISH HE WOULD LISTEN TO ME. The voice is gentle over the phone, fuzzy. It almost sounds like Cameron.

Derek has not looked particularly bad. He is pale, but he is not far removed from a nocturnal, underground life. "I wish they'd listen to me too," John says to himself, and leaves the bottles where he finds them.

At the end of the week he insists on moving. To appease his mother, he agrees to move west. Derek doesn't have an opinion one way or the other.

*

HE WENT TO A CLINIC, says the intelligence, while they're on their way west again, into Texarkana. The little dark letters march across the screen of his cell phone. STUPID PAPER RECORDS.

John chuckles a little to himself. Derek is driving and glances across the seat. "Nothing," says John. And then, bold, "Do you have tuberculosis?"

While Derek is still processing that question, Mom answers from the back: "They'd quarantine him if he did. If he broke quarantine, he'd be putting you at risk." It is unclear whether that hard tone in her voice is certainty or some kind of implicit threat.

Derek assumes the latter. "I'm not that dumb." He uses the rearview to look at Mom. "It's just pneumonia, and it's mostly gone."

"You had _pneumonia_?" John screeches. He still unused to seeing his uncle in a beard: it makes him look older, almost old enough to be of a different generation.

From countryside they are rapidly coming towards some kind of small town. With no stoplights to slow him, Derek blows past one general store after another. "Flu was bad this year. Uh, the future year I guess. Couple of people died. You sent me back after I coughed up blood."

It is something to stew over, From his pocket, John's cell phone bleeps. The intelligence has another message for him. He ignores it. In the back seat, Mom rustles the map and says nothing.

"They stuck a needle in my chest, drained some fluid," says Derek. He taps the brakes, as they encounter traffic for the first time in an hour. Just a rusted pickup, a brindled mutt in the bed with its tongue out. "Pleurisy, they called it. Big fucking needle."

The mutt lolls at them, its flat bulldog face tilted into the wind. They follow the pickup into town, other cars on all sides. Main Street is full of facades, that make two-story buildings look bigger. John's cell phone makes another noise.

"But you lived this time," John says aloud. He stares at the dog and its stupid grin.

Derek isn't the kind, he's never the kind, to worry about the contrary-to-fact. "Yeah. That's why you sent me here. For the antibiotics."

John's mouth is open to say something, even he doesn't know what, when the radio turns itself on. It is a new enough car that the radio is digital. It is not tuned to any broadcast station. MY BROTHER HAS HUMAN SOLDIERS TOO, says the radio, too loud. Petulance rolls through the car and Derek stomps on the brakes. John scrabbles for his cell phone to find out what he has missed.

"John --" Mom calls from the back, and the click-click of a weapon ready to fire.

The radio interrupts: I CAN'T CONTROL HUMANS. THEY ARE WAITING AT THE NEXT LIGHT, LEFT SIDE. WHITE VAN WITH A LOGO ON IT.

Derek's foot is firm on the brakes. He stares at the dog as its pickup pulls away, through the next intersection. The dog does not react to any enemy: but it wouldn't, would it? Not to a human. John jostles his arm. "Pull over. Hey, pull over."

A shotgun handle slides between the front seats and into John's hand as if he had willed it. Mom passes him a handgun, a folded knife, a wad of folded bills. "Cameron," she says, as if she's known all along, as if it's not weird for your robot foster-daughter to start talking through the radio, "what's the count? Just the one van?"

YES. That sharp word finally startles Derek out of his paralysis and he pulls over. The Jeep is splayed across two parking spots, but they don't care. Grenades slung at her sides, Mom readies for the frontal assault. "You two come around the block from behind. Give me two minutes from the first shot." And she's gone, dashing up the street in sneakers like a tiny Rambo. The light changes ahead of her, but there isn't time to see whether the white van advances into the intersection. John and Derek meet at the back of the Jeep, glance over each other's armaments. Across the street, a bank: its light board stops telling the temperature and starts saying HERE.

Obedient, they dash over the tar and plaster themselves to the side of the building. There aren't any security cameras visible, but you never know around banks. Out of their view, the shooting starts, or actually, the first noise is an explosion. Smoke billows up over the facades, black and heavy.

"What the hell," mumbles Derek under his breath. All things considered, he is taking it well.

John grabs a handful of his jacket. "Don't get yourself killed. I'm serious."

The bank's light board flashes GO and then NOW and then LOVE, just for an instant. Then it goes back to GO and NOW.

"Eh," says Derek. He hasn't even noticed the light board; his eyes are on the street and the tactical situation. "Nobody lives forever."

The wind shifts. They can smell the smoke. Without the need to consult one another, they rise up in unison and start to run.


End file.
